Visual Studio 2008 Tip: Open XAML Files Faster

Visual Studio 2008 has a much improved XAML design time experience over VS 2005.  However good the new designer is, if you double click a .xaml file in your solution, the default behavior for VS2008 is to display the XAML in a split window and render that same XAML is another split window.  Even with simple .xaml files on a fast 2 Core Dual computer, this takes a little longer than I want to wait.

In the VS2005 I got around this by changing the default program that opened .xaml files to the XML editor.  You can easily do this by right clicking a .xaml file in the Solution Explorer, select Open With…, then select the XML Editor and press the Set as Default button.  In VS2008 you don’t want to change your default editor to the XML editor because you will no longer have the benefit of intellisense.  VS2005 does provide some intellisense in the XML editor when editing .xaml files.

For VS2008, Microsoft has provide a new setting that speeds up the loading of .xaml files by only loading the XAML split window.

To take advantage of this new setting, from the VS2008 menu, select Tools, Options…, Text Editor, XAML and Miscellaneous.  When you do, you will see the dialog box in the above image.  Then just select, Always open documents in full XAML view.

Now your .xaml files will open faster.

The above image is the new split view control bar located at the bottom of the XAML editor.  Each of the highlighted areas above can be clicked to display a different view of your XAML.  Fire up a test project, open a .xaml file and play around with this cool new feature.  It actually works great.

Have a great day,

Just a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.